Hopefully by now you are finished (or almost finished) with your analysis of a formal and an informal assessment. Reflect on your work to identify (and describe) at least three strategies that you use (or try) in your own classroom to learn from formal assessments and have your students learn from formal assessments.
The most important strategy that I use with my formal assessments is to try and figure out which questions or problems are giving most students a problem. What I have found is that students usually tend to get the same questions wrong because either something was explained wrong during class, or there is some form of misconception. By interpreting the incorrect responses given by the students, a teacher can judge what they are thinking and sometimes determine exactly what the student was thinking when they answered the question.
Another strategy that I use with my formal assessments is that I always go over the assessment when I hand it back. This allows students to correct the answers, if I haven't done so already, and to hear an explanation of why there answer is not correct. This is very useful because it minimizes students questions about how and why you graded the assessment the way you did. Also, I believe that this demonstrates to the students that you value the assignment and that it was not just busy work that does not matter to you.
The final strategy stems from the first. Once you have identified misconceptions, you can create activities, labs, or classwork which can explain an idea from another perspective to help clear up the misconception. A misconception can form simply from the use of a word that students are unfamiliar with or from a bigger problem, by reteaching the main idea from another perspective, students are able to clarify what they were doing wrong and what they should be doing to get it right.
The most important strategy that I use with my formal assessments is to try and figure out which questions or problems are giving most students a problem. What I have found is that students usually tend to get the same questions wrong because either something was explained wrong during class, or there is some form of misconception. By interpreting the incorrect responses given by the students, a teacher can judge what they are thinking and sometimes determine exactly what the student was thinking when they answered the question.
Another strategy that I use with my formal assessments is that I always go over the assessment when I hand it back. This allows students to correct the answers, if I haven't done so already, and to hear an explanation of why there answer is not correct. This is very useful because it minimizes students questions about how and why you graded the assessment the way you did. Also, I believe that this demonstrates to the students that you value the assignment and that it was not just busy work that does not matter to you.
The final strategy stems from the first. Once you have identified misconceptions, you can create activities, labs, or classwork which can explain an idea from another perspective to help clear up the misconception. A misconception can form simply from the use of a word that students are unfamiliar with or from a bigger problem, by reteaching the main idea from another perspective, students are able to clarify what they were doing wrong and what they should be doing to get it right.